Oil boil toil trouble

Hey, so you know how the Gulf of Mexico is slowly turning into a wasteland, ja? Well, there have been a couple really good stories lately about the fact that spills like this have been happening in Nigeria's oil-producing regions for more than 50 years.

From the New York Times last week:

(By some estimates) The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years...

That's as much as 546 million gallons of oil. Shell, one of the companies which operates there, blames sabotage and theft. But:

Richard Steiner, a consultant on oil spills, concluded in a 2008 report that historically “the pipeline failure rate in Nigeria is many times that found elsewhere in the world,” and he noted that even Shell acknowledged “almost every year” a spill due to a corroded pipeline.

So it's not just BP (and for the last time, please stop calling it British Petroleum), and it's not just here. That doesn't make it less of a tragedy. But it's a reminder that rather than boycott BP (whose gasoline is actually sold everywhere, and who does not own most individual BP stations), the most important thing we can do is find ways to stop giving any oil companies our money. None of them is prepared to deal with major safety risks like deep-water drilling, and at least a few have proven themselves unwilling to deal with easily-fixed safety risks like a corroding pipe in an impoverished West African nation.

A good summary of Nigeria's oil issues:

Anup Shah, Nigeria and Oil, Global Issues, Updated: July 03, 2004